Fiber optical networks are nowadays built and widely expanded and there is a great interest in providing, in addition to branches to companies, institutions, etc. also branches to private subscribers, i.e. to apartments, private homes and estates, etc., in order to allow communication having high velocity and high capability. Then there is also an interest in reducing the costs for such installations. However, in fiber optical networks the most costly components generally are the cabling system and the laser devices used for injecting and modulating light signals transmitted in optical fibers. One way of reducing the cost is to use optical ribbon cables or ribbon fibers allowing cabling systems to be more easily handled. Then also array devices can be used provided with appropriate multifiber connectors. However, when building an optical fiber network, the final number of subscribers and the geographical distribution thereof are never fully known and thus the network must be dimensioned taking this into account. This will in almost all cases mean that in actual use of the network a number of fibers in links in the system will not be used. Then a corresponding number of the element devices of array devices will not be used. Also, the ribbon fibers are made in definite capacities including e.g. 4, 8 and 12 optical fibers. Then, if a connection line is to be built to a geographical location where one or two subscribers reside, perhaps a fiber ribbon holding four fibers is used, this resulting in that at least two fibers of the ribbon are not used. In this way the advantage of introducing fiber ribbons and device arrays can be lost.
Optical fiber networks/cabling systems having branching points are disclosed in e.g. the published European patent application No. 0 549 862 and the British published Patent application No. 2 167 609. Optical connectors for such networks/systems are disclosed in e.g. the published International patent application No. WO 93/22695 and the published British patent applications No. 2 191 598 and 2 255 652.